Screenwriting Quotes · Page 2

All screenwriting books are bullshit, all. Watch movies, read screenplays. Let them be your guide.

— Brian Koppelman

Writing a novel can be solitary at times compared to screenwriting, but I don't mind that.

— Ruth Jones

I've always been a writer, I've always been a storyteller, but I never thought about screenwriting.

— Diablo Cody

Writing a whole series was a crash course in screenwriting, which is a very different muscle to standup comedy writing.

— Ronny Chieng

Audiences are harder to please if you're just giving them effects, but they're easy to please if it's a good story.

— Steven Spielberg

I find that screenwriting is at best kind of a hackwork in some ways.

— John Milius

As much as I really like the screenwriting thing, the novel is where the author has so much control.

— Gillian Flynn

Whatever you do in terms of telling a story, the most important thing that you can define is who you are.

— John Patrick Shanley

Usually with me, the ideas I have for movies just sort of pop into my head. I've read a bunch of screenwriting…

— Leigh Whannell

Once in a while there were things in screenwriting that taught me things for fiction. But there's nothing in screenwriting that teaches…

— Joan Didion

Novelists who get shitty about screenwriting invariably can't do it, or they can't hack it in the world of what's really, in…

— William Monahan

Who is writing these screenwriting books? Not actually writing for the studios in Hollywood. These are people that have one or a…

— Thomas Lennon

I'm generally somebody who hopes for the best. It's not what one ought to do in my line of work [screenwriting], but…

— Jonathan Tropper

It's not so much that I enjoy screenwriting, though mostly I do, but the difference is, with adaptations, somebody else has done…

— Tom Stoppard

Everything starts with writing. And then to support your vision, your ideas, your philosophy, your jokes, whatever, you've gotta perform them and/or…

— Mel Brooks

I didnt write Snow White for any class, but I got bitten by the screenwriting bug and wrote a couple of scripts…

— Evan Daugherty

I was a screenwriting major in college, and really wanted to do that after I graduated, but there are no job listings…

— Mike Birbiglia

I have always credited the writer of the original material above the title: Mario Puzo's The Godfather, Bram Stoker's Dracula, or John…

— Francis Ford Coppola

I think I have always sort of cultivated a flowery writing style. I've always sort of over - written in every genre…

— Diablo Cody

It's very important for an audience to know where they are and why they are there in a musical. It allows them…

— George C. Wolfe

And how deeply do I let business considerations affect [screenwriting] choices that might otherwise be more or less esthetic? . . .…

— Edward Zwick

All these teachers and [screenwriting] books mean you see movies that have been worked over by more committees wielding more rules, that…

— Paul Schrader

When you're writing a script you have the option to embellish on life or switch the order of events or make it…

— Lena Dunham

I was about 14 when I started with a theater group; it was like a stage group on the weekends alongside school.…

— Imogen Poots

Screenwriting is like ironing. You move forward a little bit and go back and smooth things out.

— Paul Thomas Anderson

Screenwriting is a much more collaborative effort. When you write a novel, it's just you, with input from your editor.

— Meg Cabot

If you have someone on the set for the hair, why would you not have someone for the words?

— Louis Malle

“If the story you're telling, is the story you're telling, you're in deep shit.”

— Robert McKee

I just stopped playing. I did some screenwriting and got into the nature thing. Music kind of went away.

— Billy Squier

“To paraphrase Muggeridge: Everything is a parable that God is speaking to us, the art of life is to get the message.”

— Chester Elijiah Branch

I teach a course in screenwriting at Columbia, but I've never taken a course and I've never read a book about it!

— Paul Schrader

If the script's good, everything you need is in there. I just try and feel it, and do it honestly.

— Olivia Colman

Screenwriting and making movies is really playing make-believe like most of us did as children.

— Gabriel Campisi

I think if I've worked anything through with screenwriting it's that I'm not going to be able to work anything through.

— Charlie Kaufman

Screenwriting is an opportunity to fly first class, be treated like a celebrity, sit around the pool and be betrayed.

— Ian Mcewan

I don't think screenwriting is therapeutic. It's actually really, really hard for me. It's not an enjoyable process.

— Charlie Kaufman

If a story doesn't give you a hard-on in the first couple of scenes, throw it in the goddamned garbage.

— Samuel Fuller

“Collaborating on a film script involves two people sitting in a room separated by the silence of two minds working together.”

— Darlene Craviotto

It's possible for me to make a bad movie out of a good script, but I can't make a good movie from…

— George Clooney

'The Fourth Hand' was a novel that came from twenty years of screenwriting concurrently with whatever novel I'm writing.

— John Irving